WannaLearn.com How to Use Text Expansion to Save Yourself Hours of Typing Every Week The Gear and Apps You Need to Survive the Next Semester Here's Why, How, And What You Should Doodle To Boost Your Memory And Creativity Did your boss ever catch you covering an important memo with Escher-like scribbles? In high school, did your teacher call you out for drawing on the desk, your sneakers, your skin? Today, the doodle nay-sayers are being drowned out by a growing body of research and opinion that indicates that connects that seemingly distracted scribbling with greater info retention and creativity. "I can’t tell you how important it is to draw," says Sunni Brown, whose creative consultancy Sunni Brown Ink, teaches "applied visual thinking"— a.k.a doodling—to coders, designers, and even journalists. Why Doodle Studies have shown that doodling can free up short- and long-term memory, improve content retention and increase attention span. What To Doodle These Brown-recommended doodling exercises will help you rethink the familiar and make unexpected connections. "Atomization." "Game-Storming." "Process Map." When To Doodle A lesson or presentation is a particularly great time to doodle. Where To Doodle
Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better If someone granted you one wish, what do you imagine you would want out of life that you haven’t gotten yet? For many people, it would be self-improvement and knowledge. Newcounter knowledge is the backbone of society’s progress. Great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and others’ quests for knowledge have led society to many of the marvels we enjoy today. Your quest for knowledge doesn’t have to be as Earth-changing as Einstein’s, but it can be an important part of your life, leading to a new job, better pay, a new hobby, or simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake — whatever is important to you as an end goal. Life-changing knowledge does typically require advanced learning techniques. Health Shake a leg. Balance Sleep on it. Perspective and Focus Change your focus, part 2. Recall Techniques Listen to music. Visual Aids Every picture tells a story. Verbal and Auditory Techniques Stimulate ideas. Kinesthetic Techniques Write, don’t type.
6 Fantastic To-Do Apps for Getting Organized From executing projects at work to remembering to pick up a new toothbrush on your way home, there are so many little things that need to get done each day. But the age-old answer to this problem — the to-do list — can be a challenge in itself. Crumpled up pieces of paper and half-written lists are bound to get lost or trashed, and that doesn't do much for productivity or task management. Thankfully, there are many great options to bring your to-do list into the digital age. These apps offer features such as mobile updating, push notifications, and calendar integration that can kick your productivity into high gear. Not sure which app makes the most sense for you? 1. If you're a to-do list beginner or just like keeping it simple, Astrid is a great way to get on the to-do train. Developing a task system is also easy. The free version of Astrid offers the mobile and desktop apps synced through the cloud. 2. Though it's minimalist, Todoist has plenty of integration with other platforms. 3.
Back to Basics: How to Simplify Your To-Do List and Make It Useful Again The only flaw in most to-do lists - app or written - is the lack of a way to dynamically sort them based on the ever-changing priorities of our life. While I agree with virtually everything discussed above, what's missing - not from the author, but from the technology - is a flexible queueing system. Our priorities change regularly, daily if not by the minute. But a static to do list or one with simple stars or one using 1-4 importance indicators fails to do the heavy lifting. Leave any task that really needs doing undone for long enough and everything we have on our list is starred or rated as a "1." In effect, when everything is top priority, nothing is prioritized. QuietSpacing - the time management method I developed seven years ago - is both a sorting and a queueing engine. The reason it works is because the queueing is dynamic.
Visual thinking Visual thinking is a way to organize your thoughts and improve your ability to think and communicate. It’s a way to expand your range and capacity by going beyond the linear world of the written word, list and spreadsheet, and entering the non-linear world of complex spacial relationships, networks, maps and diagrams. It’s also about using tools — like pen and paper, index cards and software tools — to externalize your internal thinking processes, making them more clear, explicit and actionable. Why is visual thinking important? There’s more information at your fingertips than ever before, and yet people are overwhelmed by it. We think in pictures. Think you can’t draw? Squiggle birds (I learned squiggle birds from my friend Chris Glynn). So why is visual thinking important? The whirl. Visualization is increasingly used in business and science to simplify complexity: a picture is worth a thousand words. Drawing is a natural process for thinking, exploring ideas and learning. 1. 2. 3. 4.